CAPTURE
University in the mid-aughts, he fell into a
research program aimed at figuring out how
carbon could be used to help make concrete,
replacing some of the cement used in the
process. The concept wasn’t new, but no one
had figured out how to do it effectively at
scale. Niven looked at the problem through
a chemist’s lens, researching exactly how it
might work at the atomic level.
A year before he graduated, Niven went to
a UN conference on climate change in Mon-
treal. He was dazzled by the energy of the
10,000 attendees who swept into the city.
But what really hit home was a speech by
a representative from Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific
island nation. “He gave the most emotional
plea for help, saying, ‘We’re losing our his-
tory, our homes, our livelihoods, and our
ancestry because of sea level rise,’” Niven
says. Suddenly his work felt like something
more than just a math problem.
Two years later, Niven moved to Halifax
to be with his then-girlfriend, now wife. Her
father happened to be a successful entre-
preneur with a penchant for niche green
projects, like solar-powered marine lights,
and he helped Niven see how his ideas
could be turned into a business. With that
advice—and a little cash—from his future
father-in-law, plus $10,000 in leftover stu-
dent loans, Niven launched CarbonCure in- The concept: develop a system to
replace some of the cement used in mak-
ing concrete with carbon dioxide, thereby
that eventually results in the fine gray pow-
der we call cement also generates gaseous
carbon dioxide as a byproduct, which gets
whisked up into the atmosphere.
Those emissions add up. If the cement
business were a country, it would be the
world’s number three producer of green-
house gases, trailing only China and the
United States. No surprise, then, that
researchers and entrepreneurs around the
world are working on projects to make
cleaner concrete. The most promising are a
handful of companies that focus on making
the process of manufacturing concrete not
only less of a problem but part of the solution.
The current head of the pack is a company
named CarbonCure Technologies. It aims to
change the chemistry of that sea of concrete
slightly but significantly. Headquartered in
an aluminum-sided, two-story building in
a modest industrial park outside of Hali-
fax, a tiny city dangling off Canada’s Atlantic
coast in a time zone an hour east of Eastern,
CarbonCure’s entire staff could fit in a school
bus. At the helm is a lean, amiable, 42-year-
old engineer named Robert Niven.
Niven grew up on Vancouver Island, with
regal forests and rocky beaches for play-
grounds. During summers home from col-
lege, he worked as a firefighter in British
Columbia’s remote northern forests and
spent as much time as possible rock climb-
ing and whitewater kayaking. As a civil
engineering student at Montreal’s McGillIF YOU FIND YOURSELF AT THIS MOMENT
in a city of any size, take a look out the win-
dow. Most of what you see is made with a sin-
gle material, one that dominates our world:
concrete. It makes up the bulk of virtually
every office tower, shopping mall, high-
way, and airport on earth. We produce tens
of billions of tons of the stuff every year—
enough to build a 100-foot wall right around
the equator. And that tonnage is certain to
grow in coming years, as cities continue to
mushroom in China, Nigeria, and other fast-
developing nations. Concrete is wonderfully
useful, but it comes at a steep cost: The indus-
try that makes it eructs about 8 percent of all
annual carbon emissions.
To be precise, it’s the production of
cement—the glue that binds together
sand and gravel to form concrete—that is
the problem. Or, rather, two problems. To
make cement, you put limestone and other
minerals in a kiln and bake them at up to
2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Problem one: The
heat for those kilns is typically generated by
burning coal or other fossil fuels. Problem
two: The heat-generated chemical processPORTION OF GLOBAL CARBON EMISSIONS
→8% PRODUCED BY THE CEMENT INDUSTRY
_Without concrete, our civilization would be
nowhere. With concrete, the planet is suffering.
Some clever chemistry can help cure that problem.
BlockbusterBY
Vince BeiserILLUSTRATION BY
Jan Siemen